Month: August 2016

Last year, James, my younger brother, asked me about using a piece of music from my album Snowblades in a documentary he was filming. But, of course! Then I ended up recording two more pieces for the final scene and the credits.

This year, Director James and Producer Brandon finished their film, Project Mone’t. It’s a powerful documentary about an artist, Rae Ripple, who put her story of abuse and redemption into a stunning piece of metal art she calls her “beautiful monster.”

Project Mone’t has since made semi-finalist in the Los Angeles CineFest and won the People’s Choice Award in the Amelia Island film festival, among other laurels at festivals coast-to-coast.

Working on that tiny contribution of music, I realized my 23-yr-old Roland JV-1000 Music Workstation was showing its age. Buttons and keys stick or don’t work. There are fixes for those if I want to tear it down. However, the scary thing is that all of my MIDI data is on 3.5” floppies.

Yeah, 3.5” floppies. Think of a plastic wafer the size of a drink coaster, with less storage capacity.

So I finally bought a software sequencer and started getting my music off those floppies and into the 21st century. That led to discovering that software synthesizers have come a long way since the last time I tinkered with them. And led to Soundiron’s Olympus choir. And led to: Snowblades should be an opera!

More passion than squirrel, I’ve decided.

Pictured: A little rope south of our home last summer. We’re at the bottom tip of tornado alley, and this was my first honest-I-could-say-it-was-one tornado. Close enough for pictures. Far enough away we could watch with fascination rather than cower in the basement.